Time and tide, they say, wait for none. Deadlines don’t either, as I have learned the hard way over the better part of the last decade. In fact, sometimes they rush at you so fast that you have to pick up whatever you can find at hand and meet the challenge head-on. Of course, by whatever, I mean an electronic gadget capable of handling a word processor, a spreadsheet application and a web browser. Preferably something that does not run out of battery very fast and can handle multiple tasks at the same time.
Now I will concede this – the battle of the battery is lost. Humanity has failed to create batteries that are better than those that existed ten years ago. You can debate the Li-Po and the Li-Ion with me (don’t!) but it’s a pointless conversation. The real point is, we aren’t going to be able to run a single day of 8-10 active work hours on a single charge. Period.
Which brings me to what has been coursing through these neurons for the past few weeks – what can we do to make sure the deadlines can be defeated when they rush us like Okinawa kamikazes ? We could, in an ideal world, give folks sufficient time to gather the data, arrange and analyze it, and then organize it into something fellow humans can understand. Wouldn’t it be grand ?
More realistically, we can improve the multi-tasking part of that deadline-combating experience. Fire up MS Word (two-three documents please), half a dozen Chrome tabs and then run some music in the background. Get some cofee. Are you getting in the groove?
You are. The bad news though, is that your RAM is running out as you sip the coffee (too much sugar, again), and try to memorize the points that need to be researched. Your six tabs need to stay, but you need to search another keyword. Another Google tab. Another flurry of fingers flying across a black and white landscape. You swap back to Word, and it is slower. Change back to Chrome and open another tab. Slower still. Fire up another program – anything. Your gadget straight up tells you to slow down and take in the view outside your window. Or seems to, because by this time it has slowed down to the point where you are chugging coffee faster than taking in writing points.
Of course you know the reason why your hitherto snappy friend has suddenly aged without grace. It’s RAM, short for Random Access Memory. Yeah, the sticks of green or black that you would push into long slots in your motherboard back when you had the enthusiasm to build your own computer. Your gadget is short on RAM and the processor is starved of this much needed oxygen as it tries to do its best to help you meet that deadline.
Now, if you are one of the lucky ones, you will have a laptop, and it will have expandable RAM. As long as you know how to unscrew the back cover and remove the battery, adding RAM is as simple as figuring out which generation your device needs, buying it and slotting it in. Don’t forget to screw everything back. Voila! Your CPU just got much-needed oxygen. As it takes long deep breaths of fresh silicon, you feel a burden lift off your shoulders.
But what if you are not one of the lucky ones. You fire up Task Manager (or its equivalent) and in the RAM tab, instead of reading “Slots Used”, it reads ROC. Sure, your device probably hails from the Republic of China (Taiwan), but that’s not what ROC means. It’s Row of Chips, computerese for soldered chips of RAM that cannot be added to in any way. Not just quantity, you cannot even bump up the speeds in many cases since there is not much by way of voltage or heating overhead available.
You probably did not need to fire up Task Manager to know this. Your device would have been advertised as LPDDRx (x standing for generation) or something like that. With the coming of DDR5 laptops, the majority of manufacturers seem to have shifted to ROC configurations that make upgrading RAM virtually impossible. You can slot in a Gen4 nVME SSD of your choice (and capacity, subject to a ceiling) but not RAM.
Ironically, most of your work now resides on the cloud. Your organization probably works with Google Workspace, Microsoft Teams or some other “suite” that offers a complete set of workspace tools. Your files reside on the cloud, accessible mostly through privileged access portals. Even if you work freelance, you would still leverage Google, Microsoft, Adobe and perhaps even AWS to store your files and access them as per requirement.
You may want to store large files on your system, especially if you work with video processing or any other field where the files are large and bulky. But for everyone else, the cloud is and will remain the go-to place for accessing files and working on them.
Again, it may be argued that the storage may be used to store personal media (cat photos obviously), movies or games. These are all valid arguments, and if you are stuck on one specific device and there is not differentiation between your work device and your personal one, you may need higher storage. But even in such cases, streaming can be an option (looking at you pirate bro) and personal files can always be stored on the cloud as well.
The most cogent argument against throwing in chunks of blazing fast storage into your laptop is that you can always do that in your home system, or onto an external disk which costs a fraction of what your laptop or tablet costs. When you do need to access it, you can SSH into your home system or just plug in the external HDD/SSD that you can carry with you.
On the other hand, you do need additional RAM. Those Chrome tabs aren’t going to use the sheer force of your deadline-induced panic to open themselves. Laptop manufacturers, however, seem to think exactly the opposite. Why else are they increasingly replacing upgradable RAM slots with ROC configurations? Tablets and smartphones have always had ROC (or rather, soldered) RAM and we have had to lump it.
But how much does a manufacturer save by moving to ROC configs anyway? Most low-end Chromebooks, even the ones with Windows 11, come with just 4GB of RAM. Given that this is below the recommended minimum and amounts to strangling the already weak CPU, the approach is inexplicable. In fact, you can hardly find any 16GB RAM Chromebook on the market today. This, when the original Chromebook guys – Google – had come out with 16GB Chromebooks years ago.
The reason I am ranting about Chromebooks in particular is because they are the quintessential workhorses of the deadline-haunted corporate and academic world. These, and their other Celeron and Athlon-powered cousins, provide the basic amount of working power for those who need to get work done on the go. These are often the entry-level workers who stand to lose the most if they fail to fight off or meet the deadline. If you cannot provide sufficient RAM at that price, leave the option open for them to upgrade the RAM going forward.
For context, my own i3 powered Realme Slim Book, armed with 8GB of RAM and 256GB or RAM, is by no means a weakling of the Celeron ilk. Yet when I subject it to more than a few tabs, the decline in processing speed starts becoming an impediment to my own pace of work. When I am working on heavy projects that require 12-18 tabs open at any one time (plus other applications), my desktop with a Ryzen 5 5600 processor and 32GB of RAM starts to lag. And yet manufacturers tend to believe (or want you to believe) that it is only the rich gaming kids who need anything more than 8GB of RAM.
This brings me to the fundamental difference between RAM and storage. The real difference between local storage and cloud storage boils down to how much cloud space you have, and how fast your internet is. If you are travelling in rural areas and coverage tends to be spotty, keeping the files in your local storage makes sense. However, working from corporate offices or academic spaces would generally afford you a 50 Mbps internet connection. This is enough to work in the cloud on a regular basis.
Trouble is, there is no RAM in the cloud. What you do on the computer – whether you type, browse, watch or listen, takes up RAM on the local system and the local system only. It doesn’t matter if the Xeon or Threadripper powered server in the cloud has 1TB of RAM or even more. If you cannot keep the tabs open and switch between them efficiently without the computer – cursor and all – freezing for seconds or even a minute at a time – you will lose track of what you are doing and your work will slow down. You don’t need a fast processor – heck, a Raspberry Pi can handle most processing tasks with decent speed – but you do need a good amount of RAM.
The final argument for providing higher RAM – and allowing upgradability – takes me back to the battery. Your battery isn’t going to improve. In fact, with additional usage, actual capacity will steadily go down. To conserve battery, you will use features like battery saver (on Windows and Chrome OS) to eke out more from the limited charge in those Li-Po cells. Battery saver basically reduces the performance of the CPU – tying it down even as it struggles to breathe with limited RAM. This may conserve battery, but it will further drag down your performance, and that deadline isn’t going to go away.
So dear gadget manufacturers – laptop makers in particular – stop trying to cut out upgradability at every possible chance. RAM, more than CPU or storage, is vital to the speed at which work gets done, and there is no cloud alternative to it. Keep the RAM upgrade options open, and those who really need that additional processing speed will thank you and buy from you again.